You know what I love? Intertextuality in movies. And intertextuality in movies loves me back. We’ve been together for a while now, and it just feels right. What it lets me do is watch Heath Ledger stick it to Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain and delight at the awkwardness of having Ledger hang out with Gyllnhaal’s sister in The Dark Knight. Or better yet, it lets me turn The Prestige into a film where Wolverine and Batman are rival magicians – and Batman has a clone. See how much better that is? Read the list below, and learn how to make movies better – with more movies.

Fight Club and Ferris Bueler’s Day Off

Now, this one might be reaching a little, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to work. See, in Fight Club, awesome, attractive, can-get-away-with-anything Brad Pitt hangs out with dull conformist Edward Norton, overturns his life, and then reveals that he’s really just a symptom of Norton’s multiple personality disorder*. Que The Pixies. Whereas in Ferris Bueler, awesome [apparently] attractive, can-get-away-with-anything Matthew Broderick hangs out with and overturns the life of dull conformist Alan Ruck – and then the movie ends.

Now, for some reason, Ferris Bueller is a cult classic; the only way I can see that happening for me is I pretend that, like in Fight Club, Broderick is just the projected personality of already-crazy-looking Ruck. It makes the movie like a hundred times better – good enough that you can overlook that glassy stare in Broderick’s dead eyes.

*If I’ve spoiled this for you, I’d just like to demand that you apologize for not having watched Fight Club in it’s entirety. I accept cash.

Requiem For A Dream and Labyrinth

Alright. Yes. So Requiem For A Dream is a good solid 102 minutes of Aronosfsky stabbing you in the eyeballs. It’s pretty horrific no matter what else you’ve been watching – you could try and desensitize yourself by getting blind drunk and blacking out mid-viewing, and it would still burn your soul out. No matter what happens, you’re going to find yourself squirming at the awful crap that happens to seemingly-decent folk who get hooked on a buffet of drugs and spiral waaay the hell downwards. Amputation and prostitution follow.

But it could be worse.

You could watch Labyrinth, a silly, quirky muppet film starring David Bowie with a codpiece and the power to turn into a barn owl, and an innocent, charming young actress called Jennifer Connelly, and then let Aronofsksy stick it to your eyeballs, all the time knowing that the lady doing live sex shows to the cries of ‘ass to ass!’ for a heroin fix was once just a young girl trying to save her baby brother from David Bowie.

It happened to me. I’m…I’m not all the way better yet.

Any Morgan Freeman Film After Shawshank.

You guys have noticed this, right? Morgan Freeman is pretty much the same character, no matter where he is: Wise, Grave Black Guy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a part he plays well – he made Day In The Life Of A Goddamned Penguin sound dignified – but the minute this guy shows up onscreen, I’m waiting for him to spew some fortune-cookie bull that’ll get our hero/heroine back on their feet. He’s like a slightly-better-looking Yoda. The films that come together quite nicely for me are these: The Bucket List, Bruce Almighty, and The Dark Knight.

Think about it; Morgan Freeman dies, ascends to godhood, and the heads to Gotham because God himself is on Batman’s team. Neat, no? The trick is to build yourself a little narrative out of common elements, and ignore absolutely everything that might not agree with it.

Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Sweeney Todd

This one’s a freebie, and I shouldn’t even be including it on the list, but – Johnny Depp totally sounds exactly the same in all of these. Alice In Stupid Fucking Movieland too. It’s that dumb faux-English accent of his that makes him sound like a half-hearted Bowie impersonation. Oh, but you know what is fun? If you do watch these in order, you can pretend that Willy Wonka left the Chocolate Factory to be a pirate, only to return to a changed London to have vengeance on Alan Rickman and finally nail Helena Bonham Carter – who was also in Charlie and the Chocolate Slave Trade! Symmetry! In all seriousness, though, force your Depp-loving associates to sit through these and confront them with the knowledge that your favourite indie darling is phoning it in.

What’s also fun is the knowledge that Sweeney Todd’s director is Tim Burton – Bonham Carter’s husband. Which means he was behind the camera, telling his wife to hook up with Johnny Depp so he could watch.

The Hangover and Dude’s Where My Car

The reason I’m prescribing this is because putting these two movies together will force you to realize that, Zach Galifianakis aside, they’re the same f*cking movie. Let me count the ways:

• A bunch of guys wake up after getting trashed, missing something important.
• They retrace steps from night before.
• They encounter wild animal.
• They get interrogated by cops.
• One of them hooks up with an attractive lady and can’t remember it.
• They encounter someone sort of famous.
• They’re menaced by people who want something from them
• Realize that missing thing was never really missing.

Hangover fans, please don’t think this means I’m saying Dude Where’s My Car was better; they were both equally shite.

[images via IMDB and MPDB]